Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The Near Future

I didn’t come up with that plan myself, so I’m neither taking credit nor blame. But a plan was clearly needed after it had become perfectly clear that somehow I had managed to get myself into an overtrained state.

I had gotten plenty of advise after the abject race that had been Albi, ranging from "run Dublin, you'll be fine" to "take 3 months completely off", and, as much as it pained me, it was pretty clear that the latter advise was a lot more advisable than the former.

MC did chime in, and that helped a lot. In the end I ended taking 4 weeks off completely, which was painful, and now I'm at least back running. However, I am limited to 2-5 miles max for the rest of the year at least. The idea is to work on the lower set of muscle fibres and get them conditioned. What MC didn't say but merely implied was that this means the higher set of muscle fibres are still being unused (because the runs are so short that they never get used), meaning they get at least 10 weeks of rest, which comes pretty close to that most conservative advice mentioned earlier.

Just to point out how much of a painful adaptation this is, 4 weeks off is the longest break I've ever had since I started running. Even when I had pneumonia in 2008 I was only off for 3 weeks! And then I did not have to be so restrained for weeks and months either. The way I see it, this is the universe's punishment for being an idiot.

I've now done 5 runs, all about 35 minutes in length. I just run one way and when 17-18 minutes are up I turn around and run back. The effort is very easy. The HR is higher than I'd like but I have been told to expect changes after about 10 days.